


Chaote Ugly

by moontyrant



Series: Bucky Barnes: Professional Ghost Botherer [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ghosts, M/M, Magical Artifacts, Paranormal, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2017-09-04
Packaged: 2018-11-28 21:44:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11426811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moontyrant/pseuds/moontyrant
Summary: Bucky Barnes is you average dude. He has a supersoldier boyfriend, a job with an illustrious intelligence agency, a giant tower to humbly call home, and a demon living inside his brain. It doesn't get much more normal than that. But it can get a little hairy while he balances his social life, mental wellbeing and his demon's capricious nature, all while trying to unravel Hydra's latest evil scheme.





	1. welcum 2 my tw1sted mind  ^3^ NOW pls leaf my tw1sted mind

Bucky Barnes was your average kind of dude. Granted, he lived in Tony Stark’s superhero clubhouse, was dating Captain America, worked for SHIELD during the workweek and busted ghosts on the weekend, had a badass metal prosthetic and so many issues after a Hydra-induced internment. And oh yeah, there was a demon living in his brain.

I put a pool table in the bathroom.

He lifted a stub of candle to eyelevel and put it back down with a sigh. “Why is there a pool table in your imaginary bathroom? Wait, why do you have an imaginary bathroom?” Alone in his (and Steve’s) room, he didn’t bother relying on thinking the words. He hated interacting with the demon silently; he had to mentally spell out what he wanted to say without giving away too much or tripping himself up. It was exhausting.

All the cool kids get bathrooms. Why shouldn’t I get a bathroom. It’s my house.

“It’s _my_ brain!” he snapped. He had spread the contents of his workbag over the floor, checking his equipment piece by piece and doing any necessary maintenance. He jangled the sleigh bells-onna-stick at his demon, annoyed. This was one ghost—spirit?—pernicious entity he couldn’t bust.

 

Becca took him Christmas shopping. They waded through the overcrowded mall atrium, Bucky carrying her parcels while she made appreciative noises at various kiosks and window displays. “Bucky, look!” she cooed, holding up a candle. “It’s a candle and a lotion doodly doo!”

Buy it.

Bucky forcibly un-scrunched his face. _I am not buying that._

“Smell this,” Becca went on, perfectly oblivious. The top of the candle’s glass jar came off with a pop and she lifted the candle into his face, poking him in the nose with the wick.

“It smells pretty,” he grunted.

Buy it. Buy it. Buy it.

_Oh my god, shut up!_

The kiosk worker grinned down at them. “Did you see that the melted wax doubles as a moisturizer?”

“I know, right!” Becca enthused.

The worker dipped a finger into a candle that had been sitting on a warmer for quite some time, and rubbed a dollop of warm wax-lotion on the back of Becca’s proffered hand. “And they last a long time. The smaller ones keep me about three months a pop and I use them constantly. The big ones are good all year.”

Well we definitely need that.

_Remind me to set up an appointment with Doctor Strange. Because if you keep this up I will evict your ass._

If living with a poltergeist was like having a messy roommate, living with a demon was like having a conjoined twin no one else could see. Bucky was no stranger to intrusive thoughts—from what he could tell, everyone got them. They were little thoughts that ghosted across your consciousness, so surreptitious you almost think they came from you. _What if you jumped out of this moving car and into oncoming traffic? Roll your chap stick all the way out and take a bite out of it. Mall fountain? Time to take a swim!_

The demon’s not-voice was like an intrusive thought plugged into an industrial strength amp. He ignored it for the most part, but it required a great deal of self-control not to get into shouting matches with it. Becca wandered into a videogame store and Bucky doubled back to the candle kiosk, and bought three of the small candles in all the scents the demon liked best (based on how loud the litany of ‘Buyitbuyitbuyit’ was).

He paid and gave the worker his brightest smile before moseying leisurely back down the atrium. His free hand fished into his pocket, produced his cellphone and pressed it to his ear.

Who are we talking to. Tell them I said hi. Is it Clint. It’s Clint, isn’t it.

“No, I needed to speak with you,” he sneered. “I wanted to let you know that the candles are gifts. Which are going to other people. And you’re not going to get any. Ever.”

You would deny yourself smelly candles that double as lotion just to spite me. That’s a whole new low, Barnes.

He sighed into his phone’s receiver. “I don’t even want the candles. That’s seriously all you.”

Denial upon denial. You need help.

“Do you think Tony and Doctor Strange go to the same barber? I might have to call in a favor.”

The demon sulked the rest of the day. Bucky knew because it went terribly quiet, as unobtrusive as if it weren’t really there. He would not be fooled: It could wait, dormant, for days, weeks, months at a stretch, and then it would make some inane observation or demand. It showed up in his thoughts, turning up like a bad penny.

 

With SHIELD mandated therapy twice a week, Bucky went through three different psychologists before landing on one that didn’t make him want to claw his own face off. His first therapist he called Sad Sack McBeige Guy. Sad Sack had rheumy blue eyes and a round face, soft and white like rising dough, and a weird knack for bumming Bucky out without the need to open his mouth. Shrink the second he called Sad Sack Too Many Tissues. She was sympathetic and quiet, and the only things she ever said were little condolences sprinkled throughout their sessions with a fortune cookie proverb plunked awkwardly at the end as he was getting up from her sad gray couch. Tissues earned her name by having three boxes of single-ply Kleenexes in her office at any one given moment, and also no garbage cans. The third therapist was called Foghorn Leghorn, because Bucky never liked that cartoon character and Foghorn was so damn loud. Bucky walked into his office, and the door was barely open before Foghorn bugled out “Why, good morning Mister Barnes! And how are we today!?” His booming voice snapped whatever was left of Bucky’s frayed nerves that fateful morning, so Bucky turned on his heel and marched out the way he’d come.

 His current therapist managed to earn her real name. Kelly he liked well enough; she was all business and gave off the air of actually listening. She also kept her voice down to normal indoor tones, and there was a conspicuous trashcan placed within easy reach of the couch. Bucky wasn’t necessarily a teary kind of client, but he appreciated not finding crumpled Kleenex hidden between the couch cushions.

In fact, he liked Kelly well enough he felt like he could tell her about the demon. Well, he needed to tell _someone_ because sitting on this little secret was killing him. He couldn’t tell Steve, because, ugh, Reasons. He couldn’t tell any of the other Avengers because they didn’t need to goddamn know that about him, thank you very much. He couldn’t tell Becca because she would lose her mind. So that left Kelly, who he could be sure would hear him out before making sympathetic noises, and wouldn’t dump him in SHIELD medical. Probably wouldn’t dump him in SHIELD medical. Okay, he was about forty percent sure she wouldn’t call for some nice young men in clean white coats when he told her, but he’d worked with slimmer chances before and he turned out just fine.

For a given value of fine.

_Shut up._

There was no easing up to it, so he decided to get into it without any preamble. “There’s a demon inside me.”

Kelly’s brow furrowed and she nodded slowly, waiting for him to elaborate. Bucky took a breath and focused on his hands folded over his knees, one palm warm and slick with perspiration, the other cold and hard. “It’s not a metaphor,” he went on. “I’m not saying I have demons named cute things like PTSD or Depression. I have an actual occult entity living between my ears.”

Kelly scribbled some illegible shorthand onto a piece of scrap paper on her desk. “This demon…does it talk to you.”

Bucky winced and made a wavery so-so hand gesture. “It’s not auditory. It’s like walking along on a warm kitchen floor and stepping on a half-melted ice cube. And then there’s the words, or the shape of the words, just sitting there in my working memory waiting to be noticed.”

When will senpai notice me.

_I am never showing you the internet again. Fuck._

Kelly raised a pencil-thin eyebrow. “Is it talking to you now?”

He made another so-so gesture. “It’s commentating. It thinks it’s funny.”

No, I think I’m hilarious.

“Ugh, like that.”

Kelly nodded. “Tell me about this demon.”

With a few stops and starts, he recounted the story: Stuck in the Hydra hellhole, a demon for a cellmate, too much excitement for his blood, bippity boppoty boo, a kind of occult tumor hanging out in his consciousness, so far benign as much as inoperable. He kept his eyes down for the retelling, not because the story felt too saucy to share while looking someone in the face, but because his demon kept _helping_ and if he didn’t concentrate on the office’s carpet fibers he might develop a kind of tell-tale tic.

“And you have a history of occultism.” No judgement, but Bucky knew how it would sound to a person with letters after her name. Kelly was cool and all, but people with letters after their name usually also think all of life’s problems can be named and dropped into neat little boxes, the same way a hammer sees every problem as a nail.

“I bust ghosts for a living,” Bucky grunted, hackles rising in spite of himself. He breathed in hard through his nose. “It doesn’t make me delusional, and it doesn’t make this… _this_ any less valid.”

Kelly made a tick mark in her notes. “What is your demon like?”

Bucky took a moment to switch gears. “It…likes smelly candles. It thinks it’s funny. It doesn’t have an eidetic memory, but it files information away so it might as well have eidetic memory.” He rubbed a hand against his eyes. “That damn filing system. It built, get this, it built an entire mansion to keep all of its crap.”

“A mansion?”

“It calls it a mind palace, but it’s just a whole bunch of rooms or ideas or places, cobbled together in no particular order. I thought it was making it up at first, because my mind only has room for a handful of song lyrics and how to make toast most days, but if I drop into a good trance state I can take a walk through the place. Of course, any time I do I get lost, so I have to drift out of trance to make it back out. It’s not very efficiently made.”

Fight me, James Barnes.

“What did it just say?”

Bucky consciously composed his face. “Nothing important.”

Kelly nodded slowly.

Bucky sank back into the couch. “It likes chocolate but not peanut butter, it likes crackers and cheese but not together, it likes Bruce but not Thor or Steve—“

“It doesn’t like your boyfriend?” Kelly interjected. She usually didn’t interrupt her clients, which was why Bucky found himself going over the past two minutes of confessions to find the source of her alarm.

“It’s not real vocal about the people it doesn’t like,” he hedged. “But it always wants to talk to some people, and when I’m with other people it shuts down. Almost like it goes to sleep or something. Not a peep when I’m with Steve or Thor. Which is why I’m with them so much,” he added banefully.

“Does it ever want you to hurt others or yourself?”

He shook his head. “No, otherwise I would have committed myself as soon as I got back Stateside. Sometimes it wants me to start shit, but that’s pretty much dialed way back, probably because I hang out with the Avengers and it doesn’t want to mess with the team dynamic.” His lips curled. “That might hurt Bruce or Clint’s _feelings_.”

Clinton Barton is a beautiful avian cinnamon roll. You should pay for his college, Barnes.

Bucky sighed. “More often it wants me to do really weird shit, like pay for Clint to get an education he _doesn’t frickin’ want_.”

“It must really love Clint,” Kelly said. Bucky wouldn’t want to play a game of poker with Kelly, that was for sure.

“That’s because they’re both impulsive asshats who love theatrics as much as they love pizza. Clint runs around with a bow and a dog, and all I get every day is ‘Where’s Clint. I hope Clint is having a good day. Where’s Lucky. I hope he’s having a good day too. If you put pizza in a pentagram will it summon them, do you think.’ No, asshat. That’s not how human beings work.”

Kelly coughed into her fist, something she did when Bucky felt particularly facetious during their sessions.

“It likes soft things, and bubble baths, and reduced sodium chips,” Bucky listed dully. “It likes saturated colors, natural daylight, the sound a marching band makes when one of the brass players falls down.”

“Does it have a name?”

“Hell no! I’m not gonna name this fucking parasite!”

Naaaaaaaaaamesssssss.

“What, encourage it!” Bucky balked. “Pass.”

The side of Kelly’s mouth turned up. “I don’t know. I find most people have an easier time fighting their demons when their demons have names, even if the names are PTSD or Depression.”

Ooh. See what she did there.

Bucky scowled. “It likes you.”

“I’m flattered. It likes me better than Steve Rogers. I’m going to go ahead and put that on my curriculum vitae.”

“Well, as far as references go I’m not half bad. I’m a two-for-one.”

 

You can’t go back.

Bucky rolled his shoulders under the weight of his rucksack. In his line of work, he tended to come across a few professionals.

You can’t undo what you have done.

“Be quiet,” he growled to the empty air, making a few of the nearest passengers on the bus inch away from him. Steve, comforting solid presence on his six, gave his waist an awkward pat.

There are professionals like them all over the multiverse. Asgard has them. Ring World has them. Saukalong 4, a small terrestrial planet populated by suspicious green amoebas, has them. Professionals like these are a given, a universal constant, like taxes or death.

It took a keen eye to pick the shopfront out of the clutter of other shopfronts. While every other business waved its metaphysical arms and hopped up and down, this one would have pulled its hat brim low and sulked. If it ever had an awning, the current owner must have had it taken off so that the building offered no shelter to passersby from the elements. Its windows were tinted, so that someone intent to peek inside would have to press right up to the glass, hands cupped around their face to block out the sunlight.

The little bell over the door jangled when Bucky and Steve walked inside. Incense smoke curled on the warm, listless air, spicy and cloying. The man behind the long glass counter raised an eyebrow at them by way of greeting; he was tall and stocky, his face a patch work of acne with a gnarled scar bisecting one eyebrow, his dark hair twisted into neat dreads and tied back by a length of brown suede.

Bucky stilled, barely over the threshold. “That’s not…Sparks?”

The man’s other eyebrow lifted, incredulous. “As I live and breathe, that’s not Bucky Barnes, is it?” And before Steve could do more than tense up the big man came around the counter and had Bucky in a bear hug that lifted him off the ground.

From what Steve could cobble together in the inane chatter that followed, they used to go to school together, and knew each other from the Zombie Security Council (whatever that was). And apparently Sparks had changed a great deal since then, filling out with muscle, growing his hair long, and “Got a voice like the Grand Canyon” (whatever _that_ meant).  

A shadow in near the back of the shop cleared her throat, and Bucky and Sparks separated, looking as if they only just now remembered where they were and what they were doing here. “I believe a Mister Barnes has an appointment with me?” The woman was middle-aged, plump, and something about her stirred memories of simpler times. She looked like winter afternoons, small feet perched on a step stool while small hands tried to work the bubbles out of bread dough. She looked like the buzz of cicadas on a boiling hot summer day, the cold spray of a sprinkler over the yellowing lawn, a thousand flower beds in need of weeding with the green foam rectangle braced under popping knees. She looked like the click of crochet needles, an afghan in muted pastels carefully folded into a square and placed under the Christmas tree. She looked like caramel apples stuck fast to wax paper, and the cussing of trying to pull them free without ripping the paper or losing any caramel. She looked like the smell of Capri menthols and the leather interior of an Oldsmobile, with the windows rolled down low and the Beach Boys crooning on the radio, cruising with nowhere to go.

Bucky blinked himself free of his reverie. “Um, yeah. Yes. That’s me.” He forced his legs to take him to the beaded curtain she held aside for him but she stabbed a long-nailed finger at Steve.

“Only one guest per session, I’m afraid. Trev, do keep Mister Barnes’s friend entertained.”

The man who may have been Sparks or Trev or both returned to his place behind the counter, suddenly bashful. Steve tucked his hands into his pockets and watched Bucky follow the woman up the stairs behind the beaded curtain. “So.”

“So.”

“So I guess you know Bucky?”

His mouth twitched. “We go way back. I had a real piece of work for a roommate in college. I think I spent almost every day at Bucky’s place. You know, he was actually the one who got me into this.” Trev gestured around the room.

Steve’s eye caught on a jar with something dark and shriveled suspended in yellow brine. It squirmed. “What is all this…stuff?”

 

Bucky followed her out of the gloom of the front and up the stairs, into a cool, bright room. “This is where the magick happens.” She waved him into a chair at the little kitchen table. And it was a proper kitchen; she had a room downstairs for your garden variety marks and faithful customers, but when someone like Bucky came a-snooping, she made a point to bring them through all the smoke and mirrors, to the backstage. This was where the real magick happened.

The yellowed, warped linoleum underfoot had been swept and mopped and scrubbed to within an inch of its life. Bucky, if he cared to, could have seen his reflection in the steel of the sink. The kitchen smelled strongly of citrus and vinegar; a white taper candle burned by the doorway.

Bucky cleared his throat. “You’re a chaote?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Call it a hunch. Well, and there isn’t a kitchen witch alive that keeps their house as neat as you do and _doesn’t_ alphabetize and color code their spice hoard.

She grinned and puttered about the kitchen, pouring water in a red kettle and setting it on the burner. “Chaotes are a dangerous breed, Mister Barnes. But then, you do like danger.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Who was that man you dragged into my shop?” She eyed the burner until it turned orange. The water in the kettle grumbled.

“My friend. Why?”

 

“Some of these things are, uh, curiosities,” Trev said. “Fatua likes to collect cursed objects to keep them off the streets.” Trev gingerly took the jar off its shelf and placed it on the glass counter. He unscrewed the lid. “Tell me what you’re thinking right now.”

Trev rested the metal lid on the counter.  “I don’t know what’s in there, but it’s really gross and creepy.” Steve couldn’t take his eyes off of it. He got the distinct feeling that the shriveled mass was looking right back at him with eyes it didn’t have. “That thing is terrible. Why do you have it?”

Trev snapped the lid back on the jar. Steve blinked, and only then realized that he was standing directly over the jar, hand poised to plunge into yellow brine. Steve took a step back. “It’s the grossest thing you’ve ever seen, right?” Trev said lightly. “And you also want to touch it. You want to pick it up and hold it in your hands more than you have ever wanted anything in your life. And the very idea is revolting but it’s like you can’t even stop yourself.” He put the jar back in its place on the shelf with care. “That’s cursed objects for you. Fatua studies them in her spare time to figure out what it is, exactly, that makes them so irresistible. She thinks it’s something in the objects themselves, but I think that _pull_ , that _compulsion_ to fuck with cursed shit, that’s just human nature.”

“Why doesn’t it affect you then?”

Trev spread his hands out over the counter. “When I first started working here, I saw firsthand what happens to someone that puts their hand in that jar. It isn’t pretty. I couldn’t eat hamburgers for two months after that, and I love me my hamburgers.”

Steve tucked his hands into his pockets, and made a note to never pull them out again until he was safely in the sunlit street. “I never thought it would be dangerous, working in a little shop like this.”

Trev shrugged. “Nine times out of ten, I’m safer than a pizza delivery boy. It’s that tenth time where things get dicey.”

 

“You know, I can see auras when I have the mind to. I can see your aura, and Trev’s aura. But not your friend’s aura. How do you explain that?”

“I don’t.”

“Hmm.” She dropped a tea bag into a chipped ceramic mug and poured hot water over it. “I read a book once, fiction, very enjoyable—where a character didn’t have an aura. And he turned out to be the antichrist.”

She set the mug in front of Bucky, who frowned up at her. “I’m pretty sure Steve isn’t the antichrist.”

“Of course not.”

“But I know a demon who doesn’t like him. That’s actually what brings me here today.” He tapped the space between his eyebrows with a metal finger. “I wanted to ask you if you know a good exorcist or rite to make me. Well. Whole again.”

“Are you a man possessed then, Mister Barnes?”

“Not as such. But I am in possession of a demon I don’t have a need for.”

She hummed and sipped at her tea, eyes roving over the opposite wall some inches above Bucky’s shoulder. “A few come to mind, but I would just live with the demon, were I in your shoes. My late husband, Evan, had a case of the toenail fungus. You know the only lasting cure is to remove the toenails? Sometimes the cure is worse than the ailment.”

“I’d rather make that decision for myself.”

She grinned. “You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t.”

She showed him a few vials of suspicious herbs. She recommended a few books—the kind that are handwritten with suspicious brown ink and bound in more suspicious thin leather. She asked him if he had tried yoga yet, and in the end she dropped a tiny amber vial of oil into his palm. “One drop, by mouth, twice a day,” she told him sternly. “And for the love of god, keep yourself out of direct sunlight while you take it. If that doesn’t help, we can resort to more dramatic means, but I’d rather not come to that.”

He rolled the vial between his fingers and pocketed it. “Thank you. What do I owe you?”

She flashed him another smile. “The man walks Steve Rogers into my house and asks what he owes me. You know the price is steep.”

“But always worth it.” He opened his wallet and gave her his business card, a faded picture of him and Becca from three years ago, and last he plucked a strand of hair from his head.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” she grinned, taking his payment. Then she gave him a dramatic bow from the waist. “Bless the path you take in this life, and may we meet in the next.”

“Fuck you,” he laughed.

“May the stars light your way!”

“Yeah, yeah.” He shrugged back into his jacket and made his way to the stairs.

“May the wind always be at your back!”

“I’m going, I’m going!”

 

Steve ambled along the walls of the shop and eyed the merchandise, glad he could change the subject when he spied a notice on the wall next to a stand of leather bound books.

_Do not Ask about Rainchecks_

_Do not Ask about Spell Jars re: Romance_

_Do not Ask about Returns_

_Do not Ask about Ichor re: the buying or selling of_

Steve almost asked about the creative use of Capital Letters but at the last moment decided not to be an asshole. “So what’s ichor? Customers ask about it a lot?”

“I wouldn’t say a lot,” Trev rearranged a few of the impulse buys next to the register, stacking them into a pyramid with middling success. Worry stones do not tessellate. “But the ones who come asking to buy it are bad news, and the ones trying to sell are worse.” Worry stones clattered across the glass case.

“See, now I’m really curious.”

Trev waggled a hand at him. “It’s usually blood from a thing that doesn’t die. Very potent stuff in the right hands. Well, the wrong hands, usually. If you want to hex someone and their family seven generations down, you use ichor. Wanna raise an undead army to dismantle your stepfather’s mcmansion, you want ichor. Going to storm heaven and devour God, ichor.”

“Jesus.”

Bucky emerged from the beaded curtain, apparently no worse for wear. "Ready to go?"

"Ready as you are."

Bucky grinned and bumped his fist against Trev's. "It's Trev now, huh? We should catch up later. Think you can find me on Facebook?"

Trev snorted, "Since when did you get Facebook?"

"It was nice meeting you, Trev," Steve said, feeling strangely formal in spite of himself. He stuck his hand out before he could think better of it- why couldn't he just go for a fistbump like a normal person?- and Trev gave it a firm shake.

"Take care, Steve. Look after Barnes for me, will ya? The guy attracts trouble like you wouldn't believe."


	2. Nightmares

Bucky took the oil twice a day by mouth, even though it tasted like ass. He rose early in the mornings and did twenty minutes of yoga. He meditated, and burned candles, and took baths of chamomile and pink salt.

Did the demon budge? Not a bit. If anything, his efforts seemed to stir up something ugly in his mind, something just south of conscious thought where even the demon couldn't reach. Bucky found himself wracked awake by dreams he couldn't remember, a feeling like a fist clenched tight around his pounding heart and cold sweat soaking into his sheets.

 It must have been around the third nightmare fueled night that something in Bucky finally crumbled. Steve found him in the breakfast nook on one of the common floors, pouring over a paper tablet with a chewed pencil, half a dozen crumpled papers scattered around him. “Buck?”

Bucky startled, sending his chair flying and the pencil landed in the wall with sufficient force to stick there. It twanged softly. Bucky grumbled something indistinct and rubbed a hand over his face. “Hey Steve.”

 _Are you okay_ shriveled in Steve’s mouth. He scrabbled for something useful to say. “What do you need?”

Bucky’s hands clenched and unclenched. “I need. Fuck. I need a tattoo artist.”

Steve frowned. “Okay?”

“I need to be better at designs. I need the right thing.”

“Bucky?”

“I’m lucid, Stevie.”

“Can I touch you?”

“Please.” The single word bubbled up from somewhere around Bucky’s naval. Steve’s hands found his waist, and all at once Bucky sank against that solid warmth. His eyes stung. He forced himself to breathe. “You know, I keep thinking about how…how it would have been if I hadn’t fought back. If I let Hydra take me. All of me.” The arms around him tightened. “I was so tired, Steve,” he rasped. “I could have given up. I wanted to.”

“But you didn’t,” Steve said against his hair.

Bucky kept his eyes trained on the ceiling, knotting his fists in Steve’s soft sleep shirt.

“There’s a part of me that did, though.”

 

Two weeks and a hundred rejected designs later, the demon sighed and rolled around behind the dark of Bucky’s eyes. It stared at the stark, black markings inked into his skin, the flesh still hot and puffy and irritated.

What is that.

“That is a tattoo of a sigil I made. Being alive and doing things charges it, being a normal human being activates it.”

What does it mean.

“It means, ‘I bring light into dark places.’” He liked this design—complex without being crowded, interesting but easy on the eyes, stark and sharp and strong, enclosed in a thick circle on his right breast, a little to the side of his heart.

Steve just about swallowed his tongue when he saw it. Bucky still felt smug.

I like it a lot.

His scalp prickled with the force of the sentiment. He scowled at the mirror and his own face scowled back at him, but he thought he caught a glimmer of shadow over his shoulder, a shade that evaporated if he looked at it properly. “You like it because it’s amazing. But don’t go around thinking it’s yours.”

Nope, it’s definitely mine.

“You don’t even have a body to wear it on,” Bucky scoffed.

Still mine. You know, in spirit.

“Is that…is that a _pun_?”

That night, when he startled awake from a nightmare of choked smoke and blood spatter, his hand fluttered up to his chest and pressed against the sigil there. It throbbed under his hand, still so tender and new, and he settled a little easier into the mattress.

He was here, alive and safe and himself.

_I bring light into dark places._

The demon stirred even as his eyelids slid shut and he drifted back to sleep. It stared into the eternal fuzzy darkness that waits just behind the eyes of all living things. It shivered. 

 

He was actually doing a sink of dishes when he got the call. She was a little girl, and she was scared, and Bucky sometimes felt like his heart wasn’t big enough but today was not one of those days. The little girl was scared, her voice full of tears even over the phone, so Bucky dropped everything. Someone needed him.

He probably didn’t need his work bag, but he preferred to be over prepared than caught unawares without his sleigh bells-onna-stick. When he knocked on the front door of the townhouse, a confused woman answered. The door opened a crack and she peered down at him, at the stubble of his jaw and the duffle carelessly slung over his shoulder. Her jaw tightened. “Can I help you?”

He put on his best disarming smile. “My name is Bucky Barnes,” he told her. He plucked a business card from his breast pocket and handed it to her through the narrow space. She squinted at the print.

“Some kinda ghost buster?” she muttered.

A patter of feet and a small body collided with the back of the woman’s legs. “Is he here!?”

The woman had merely been annoyed, but now her expression soured straight into angry. “Did you call him?”

Buck dropped to one knee and a pair of eyes the size of fifty cent pieces peered at him from around the woman’s legs. “Please help.”

Her name was Belinda May Sorkovski, and the woman attending to her was a babysitter. Belinda took Bucky by the hand and forcibly pulled him into the foyer, never minding her babysitter’s protests. “It won’t stop talking,” she babbled. “Mama took the batteries out of it but it only gets louder and louder. Miss Mandy threw it away yesterday but it’s in my room again.”

“Because you dug it out of the trash,” Miss Mandy snapped, trailing behind them. Bucky didn’t think that was the case, especially when Belinda stopped in her tracks about halfway down the hall. “It’s in there,” she whispered, pointing to the second door on the left.

Bucky nodded. “I’ll go take a look.”

“Be careful!”

He rested a hand on the top of her head. “I will,” he promised, and stepped into the breach.

As far as little girls’ bedroom went, Belinda seemed to be going for a woodland princess theme. There was definitely a lot of pink. And frills. He remembered Becca had been very much into the macabre aspects of fairytales—she wanted to be a cryptid as a career path when she was five. Not Belinda, though. Bucky stepped over a pair of clip-on fairy wings and a small heap of stuffed animals and let his eyes relax. He watched for shadows out of the corners of his eyes, for movement or shifts that would escape your garden variety person.

He could feel disquiet radiating in the little room. He wouldn’t want to sleep in here, either, even with the nightlight cranked up to full luminosity. Something nasty lingered here, potent enough to make him grit his teeth.

And then he saw it.

“Why is it always a Furby?” he muttered. As if feeling his eyes on it, the Furby stirred. Its eyelids fluttered open and its ear gave a twitch.

“Me. Hungry,” it gritted out, with a voice like decaying servos. Gooseflesh prickled down Bucky’s flesh arm. The Furby’s little plastic beak clicked open and shut a few times, chewing on air. “Huuuuuunnngryyyyy,” it gritted out. The toy pivoted, as if being turned by an invisible hand, and its plastic eyeballs rolled back in its head while it screamed,filling the little pink bedroom with a sound like screaching machinery.

In the hall, Belinda burst into terrified sobs. Bucky pulled himself together; he had a job to do. “Shut up!” he said sharply, which the Furby ignored, because of course it would. Bucky gave himself a mental shake, even while his skin crawled under that audial onslaught. He dropped his bag to the floor and took out the salt and the sleigh bells-onna-stick just in time for the Furby to fling itself off the windowsill and at his face. He brought the bells-ona-stick down hard and was rewarded with the dull thud of a small animatronic body hitting the carpeted floor. The Furby’s screaming dropped in pitch but not volume, a baritone wail that wormed its way right into Bucky’s chest cavity and bowels. “Oh, fuck you, buddy,” he gritted out, and slammed his stick down again. And again. And a fourth time just because it was so satisfying.

The Furby kept yelling at him, a single wordless caterwaul. He upended his canister of salt on the thing and started shouting at it. “Excretus ex fortuna, tu es! Dico, dico, dico! Fabricati diem, punc! Memento mori, memento quintus nowember, memento veni vidi vici!” Eventually, completely covered by a mound of white salt and after several more blows from the bells-ona-stick, the screaming choked off into a kind of shocked silence.

Bucky glared at it. He prodded it with the stick. It did not stir. He straightened up and relaxed his eyes again, let the natural shadows of the room be natural shadows for a moment in the corner of his eye. When the skin-crawly feeling abated and the pink room was, once more, a pink room for a little kid to sleep in, he ran a hand over his face. He grabbed the Furby gingerly by its plastic-y mane and gave it a little shake, as much to see if it would move as to get some of the salt off of it. Dead plastic eyes stared back at him, the orange beak open in permanent outrage.

“Factum est, bitch,” he sneered at it, and shoved it in his work bag before he got to work cleansing and warding the room.

The Furby did not so much as sputter the entire way home, which Bucky took as a good sign. Unfortunately, the victorious crowing he planned turned to ashes in his mouth when he stepped onto Steve’s floor. Steve sat on the couch, eyes trained on the carpet, hands hanging loose between his knees.

“Hey Stevie, what’s up?” Bucky dropped his work bag by the door and toed off his shoes.

Steve looked up with red-rimmed eyes. “Buck,” he said, voice thick. He pulled him into a bone-crushing hug, which Bucky returned with interest. It wasn’t like he needed to worry about breaking him.

“I’m here, buddy,” Bucky wheezed.

Steve let out a shuddering breath. “She’s gone. I just found out.”

Bucky didn’t need to ask who he meant. “What do you need?”

“I can’t do this alone.”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

 

Bucky hadn’t been to many funerals. He never got the chance to be close to most of his relatives, since his parents moved all the way to New York from Indiana. He was too young to remember his father’s funeral in any kind of detail, but he remembered the rain, how it painted the streets silver under the lampposts on the way home, the way the lilies on the casket drowned under charcoal clouds, the way the soft grave dirt squished under the only pair of nice black shoes he owned at the time.

Rain sputtered down on them, pattering hollowly against their umbrella. The lost look hadn’t really left Steve’s eyes since getting the news the night before, so Bucky kept a guiding hand at the small of his back, steering him through the parking lot and into the little non-denominational church. They paused in the mouth of the sanctuary and dropped onto the deep red carpeting. At the front of the church, a spray of white lillies rested over a sleek casket that, if he didn't know any better, Bucky would say was built for speed. Of course, after hearing Steve's favorite war stories he wouldn't be too surprised if the coffin had stealth capabilities and secret compartments. Natasha waved them over to her, and Bucky brightened up. “You guys came.”

Steve blinked first at her, then down the length of the pew. “You all came,” he breathed.

Bruce smiled softly, digging a sucker and a small pot of play dough from his pocket and handing them both to Tony. “We weren’t really going to miss Peggy’s funeral, Capsicle,” Tony balked.

“Gives him something for his hands and his mouth to do,” Bruce explained in his low, reserved voice but when he looked up at them over the rims of his glasses laughter danced in his eyes.

“We all knew Peggy Carter,” Clint said. “She was the foundation of SHIELD.”

“She used to babysit me,” Tony said around the sucker. He peeled open the little plastic pot and dug the soft orange dough out.

“Agent Carter was pivotal in taking down major factions of the Red Room,” Natasha said. “I never worked under her directly, but if it weren’t for her, I don’t know that I’d be here right now.”

“I did not have the chance to meet with Agent Peggy Carter,” Thor piped up from the other end of the pew. “But it is my understanding that she was a great warrior and leader, and I am humbled to be able to honor her death. And one day if I am worthy, I shall meet her properly, at the table of Valhalla if I should fall in battle.” Thor stopped abruptly. Steve dropped his chin to his chest, fresh tears running down his face.

“I can’t believe you’re all here,” he choked out.

Bucky squeezed Steve’s elbow. “Didn’t I tell you? You don’t have to do this alone. Come on, I think the service is going to start.” They took their seats and the preacher made his way to the front.

He didn’t pay much attention to him as the service progressed. All he knew was that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Steve didn’t follow along with the service either, preferring to keep his eyes down, hands clasped over his knees in a death drip. Bucky fumbled with the hymnal when the organist in the back struck up a somber number, and that was the only thing that saved him.

The sanctuary doors slammed open so hard their hinges groaned. “Nobody move!” Bucky raised the hymnal to his throat as he turned, in time for some kind of dart to embed itself in the brown binding. The Avengers rose from their pew in a single movement; every SHIELD agent in the place whirled to face the intruders, hands flying to their holsters for the weapons they hadn’t deigned to bring to a damn funeral. Metal canisters rolled down the aisle, filling the air with blue smoke. Steve’s hand hit Bucky’s back, fingers splayed, pushed him to the cold floor.

“Damnit Rogers!” But too late, Steve was climbing over the backs of the pews, without his iconic shield, without a single gun, with nothing to put between himself and a team of hostiles in inch thick black tact gear. Bucky regained his feet again, only for Thor to push him back under the pew.

“Damnit Thor!” he snapped.

Thor lifted his hand and Mjolnir leapt into his grasp, hurtling through the air from who knew how far away. “Stay down, Bucky Barnes!” Thor bellowed. It was the kind of voice that rallied troops right before walking into a suicide mission. It was the kind of voice that demanded a “Yes, sir” whenever it was finished talking. It was the kind of voice that knocked your knees to the ground when a courtier wasn’t there to make sure you knelt properly before royalty. It was, in fact, the kind of voice you didn’t even think to argue with, so Bucky could only look on in open mouthed horror when the unfriendlies, a team of at least eight, maybe more, hurled something round and bright and awful at Thor.

The blue smoke curled against the peaked ceiling. Bucky’s nose and throat and eyes stung, even as he pressed a sleeve to his face in an effort to stifle his coughs.

“No!” he rasped, even as Thor tumbled to the ground. Mjolnir skittered across the floor and did not move again. Neither did Thor.

“No!” Bucky staggered up. A flash of red hair caught his eye, a hostile lugging a limp Natasha onto his shoulder and making for the exit. Two dragged a still struggling Clint out an improvised side exit. Their boots crunched over pieces of stained glass window. Bucky cast around, but already it seemed his friends had been swept away. He stumbled to the huddled figure of Bruce, still slumped in his seat, a dart sticking out of his neck. He couldn’t see Tony, he couldn’t hear him either, which meant he was incapacitated or…worse.

“Get…get away from him!” Bucky snarled, and lunged for one of the intruders who had been showing a little too much interest in Steve, where he had fallen. The guy straightened up and drew his side arm, aiming it straight for Bucky. “Don’t you fucking touch him!” Bucky babbled. In the back of his mind, his personal demon jumped up and down and waved its arms at him.

What exactly do you plan to do here. You don’t have a gun, a weapon, or any leverage.

“Shut up,” he gritted out, just in time for a dart to hit his sternum. “Ah, what the shit!” He yanked it out of his shirt, but too late. The church teetered under his feet.

“Leave him,” one of the hostiles barked. “Help me with Rogers.”

 

Bucky sat bolt upright. The paramedic startled, a blue gloved hand braced against his bare chest in a weak attempt to push him back against the hard gurney. “Sir, I need you to stay still!”

Black spots flashed across Bucky’s field of vision. “Get off me,” he slurred. The ambulance lurched. “Seriously get off,” he groaned, “I’m gonna—“ The contents of his stomach made an unwanted cameo appearance, splashing across the metal floor and, unfortunately, the EMT’s shoes. Bucky grimaced and flopped back down on the gurney, blinking through the wave of darkness threatening to push him back into unconsciousness.

“Sir, do you know where you are?”

“In a moving vehicle, other than that? Not really.”

“Can you tell me who the president of the United States is?”

“An evil Cheeto with a squirrel on his head.” The ambulance braked hard, making the EMT brace himself against the wall. “What’s going on?” Bucky demanded.

“Sir, you really need to stay down!”

Through the windshield, through the pouring rain, a traffic block loomed through the gathering dusk. “Don’t stop!”

“What do you mean don’t stop?!”

“Don’t stop for them, are you insane!” He slapped his prosthetic hand against the grill separating him from the front cab. “If you stop for them they will kill you.”

Whatever the EMT upfront said was lost in the squeal of tires, then a sudden sense of vertigo. Several gunshots happened in a row.

Some people just don’t listen to reason.

“Quiet you,” Bucky groaned. It took precious seconds for him to sort out his body, and also which way was up. The ambulance had landed on its side, but going by the amount of swearing going on, it seemed both EMTs would be alright, if a bit shaken. Bucky kicked open the back hatch and tumbled onto the rain soaked pavement. “Okay.” He patted his pockets. “There’s eleven hostiles surrounding me, I’ve got no weapons, no back up, it’s getting dark out, and I might be slightly concussed.”

Hit it.

“You just read my goddamn mind.”

 

 

He didn’t wear any kind of identification or insignia on his person, but it didn’t take a bloodhound to smell Hydra all over him. Bucky turned his own chair around and straddled it. A single naked bulb swung from the ceiling and cast them in a sickly yellow light. It flickered. Bucky didn’t take his eyes off the Hydra goon, gagged and bound to a metal folding chair, while he fished a box of cigarettes out of his breast pocket. He took his time, peeling off the cellophane wrapping. He flicked it open with his thumb, took out the papery foil inside, pulled a single cigarette free of the pack and fitted it between his lips.

“Got a light, buddy? Ah, never mind, right here.” He pulled a lighter from his hip pocket and lit the end. He took a long drag and contemplated the captive before him. He blew out the smoke through his nose. “I’d offer you one, but, well…” The Hydra goon watched the cherry red end of his cigarette, transfixed. Something about the smell of gasoline had a way of honing one’s senses to their peak.

Bucky took another long leisurely drag. “Listen, man, I’m not gonna lie. You’re in a bit of a pickle.” His captive audience made a low choking sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “You have two choices right here.” Bucky stirred the air with his cigarette, sending ribbons of pale smoke coiling through the air in front of him. “You can tell me what I want to know, and if it all checks out, the Avengers will come for you. There will be due process, prison, the whole nine yards. It’ll be boring. Doesn’t boring sound good right about now?” He took another pull. “Your other choice is to not tell me what I need to know, or lie to me. And in that case, there won’t be any kind of legal process for you. And you’ll be very excited for the rest of your life. Have I made myself clear?”

He stubbed out his smoke and stepped up to his prisoner, pulled down his gag. The guy grit his teeth at him. “Isn’t that a little dark?” he rasped. “You’re supposed to be one of the good guys.”

Bucky smiled. It was not, in fact, a very nice smile. He pinched the guy’s cheek with his metal hand, not hard enough to bruise but with enough pressure to make him wince. “Do I strike you as a good guy?”

 

Everything hurt, and the elevator couldn’t move fast enough and the world was coming to an end and Bucky desperately needed to sleep but not as desperately as he needed his friends back home safe and alive and the apartment was cold and empty without Steve in it, there were still his dishes in the sink (for God’s sake, Rogers, the dishwasher is right there) and Bucky didn’t even know what he needed to bring, so he threw a whole bunch of things in his work bag and even stuffed the freshly exorcised Furby in his pocket, just in case, and was back out the door.

He tried not to catch his reflection in the elevator doors, but even through the haze of exhaustion and panic and adrenaline crash, he couldn’t help but see the mess of his funeral suit, the state of his hair, the wildness of his eyes. He looked insane, right down to the numbers scribbled across his palm in ballpoint pen. Coordinates, possibly where Hydra was keeping Steve, possibly a trap, but it was a lead and he had to do something. “Jarvis?” he tried, as the elevator slowed to a stop. For a split second he imagined a gap of silence where Jarvis should be, as if Jarvis were somehow tied to Tony, as if Tony's abduction would leave the tower an empty husk.

“Yes, Mister Barnes?”

He sagged with something too delirious to be relief. The doors slid open, soundless as always, but he almost felt like there was a kind of finality there. His hand tightened around the strap of his duffle. This could be the last time he got out of this elevator. This could be the last time he…

“Jarvis, if I don’t make it back,” the words died in his throat. He scrubbed a hand across his face. “I just want it on the record, that I’m doing everything that I can. And if any of the Avengers make it, but I don’t, could you tell them,” he fixed his eyes on the empty lobby, “it was an honor, to meet them. And if Steve makes it back without me, just let him know…” his throat tightened, but he soldiered on, “that he’s a punk ass bitch that needs to do the fucking dishes.”

“I will let them know,” Jarvis said, unruffled in the way only a disembodied automated voice could be. “And if I may, Mister Barnes, it has been an honor to meet you, as well.”

Bucky ducked his head. “Don’t go soft on me now. What would Tony say?”

“Indeed.”


	3. Why is it Always Furbies

A sickly blue glow filtered through the dust on the air as Bucky sidled into the basement. His dust mask kept the worst out of his lungs, but his eyes watered even as he faced the big, cracked screen.

“James Buchanan Barnes. Born March seventeenth, 1981. We meet again.”

The voice was reedy and thin through the damaged speakers, the face on the screen composed of ones and zeros, bug-eyed and lined. A parody of a human, made by a thing that would never see the joke. Bucky’s skin crawled.

“Zola. I thought I’d see you again, but I hoped it wouldn’t be so. Soon.” Bucky dropped his work bag on the floor and rolled his aching shoulders. “Congratulations. You’ve won. You have Captain America and the other Avengers in captivity, I guess under your metaphorical thumb. Bucky Barnes is as good as gone. SHIELD is a scrambling shambles. Peggy Carter is dead. You have everything you could ever possibly want except a corporeal body.”

The face on the screen flexed, and it took Bucky a moment to realize it was trying to smile. “Soon, I will have the impossible. You’re snide remarks may give you some satisfaction, but I have done extensive research to acquire a new body.”

“Your weird robot getup isn’t a body, Zola,” Bucky reminded him, tired to his bones. He glared at the walls lined by computer banks, the assorted trolleys and beams and girders built to give the thing called Zola some sense of corporeality. “It doesn’t feel. It can’t even walk across an uneven floor. Give it up, you Nazi asshole.” He kicked one of the nearby trolleys just to illustrate the point and it toppled over like the world's worst designed roomba.

Zola’s hum buzzed through the speakers. “It is true. My attempts to fabricate a mobile unit have not yielded fruit. But, as we scientists say, if you can’t make waves, steal from someone who can.”

Metal claws closed around Bucky’s shoulders and upper arms, lifting him off the cracked cement floor. “Hey!”

“The internet has become a beacon of information, especially in the last decade. You would be amazed at what is out there, ripe for the taking,” Zola droned. “Ancient scripts, previously only found on parchment made of human skin, have been lovingly transposed into Google documents by university professors. Entire grimoires have been posted to the blogs of people who wouldn’t know the occult if it bit them. New spells are being made and tested every day, thanks to the communication instant messaging and email afford the magic using community. Folklore and legends and epics are translated and reimagined and even illustrated on the great World Wide Web. And that is how I came to discover an artifact of not insignificant power." The claws swung him bodily through the air until he was face to face with himself. His own eyes greeted him, red rimmed and wild, his face streaked with grime and blood and sweat, the once white dust mask graying even now in the dank bunker basement.

“The item before you is not a mirror, but a screen. It will pare your consciousness from your body and the ensuing void will allow me to make myself at home.”

Bucky struggled against the metal claws, thrashing and kicking. No way he was going to let his body be the favorite toy of Hydra. Again. His demon blinked out at the arms holding him aloft.

Too bad angst can’t melt steel beams.

“Get out of here,” he muttered. A shadow over his shoulder in their reflection rippled but made no move to disappear.

“We had hoped,” Zola continued, completely absorbed in his monologue, “that by capturing you the first time, Hydra could recreate SHIELD’s serum that saved your life that fateful evening. The substance, I believe, would have been powerful enough for me to choose any body I would have liked. Think, a potion made of the Philosopher’s Stone. Unfortunately, when we tested and retested your blood, we could find no trace of…unusual chemicals.

“No matter. Your precious Steve Rogers will have more than enough to spare, and his little Asgardian friend besides.”

Bucky snorted, “Hate to break it to you, but Stevie’s just as human as I am.”

“Hate to break it to _you_ , Barnes, but Steve Rogers is no more mortal than I am.”

Something cold arced through Bucky’s gut. “Ichor.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Steve’s not mortal. He survives everything,” he went on, thinking aloud. “His blood is especially dangerous because it’s not blood, it’s ichor.”

“Very astute. It was his blood that powers the artifact.”

“And what else are you going to use his blood for?” he breathed, a new wave of terror washing through him. Ichor, properly stored and used, could do just about anything. Resurrect the dead, kill the nearly-immortal, banish angels, desecrate the soil and the sea…and Steve, a blood farm in himself, strapped to a gurney in a dark, cold cell underground, kept alive but only just. Only just.

“Your cunning betrays you, Barnes,” Zola sneered, voice tinny as it doubled in volume. “Before I remove you from this mortal coil, let me comfort you with the promise that your beloved’s blood will be used to resurrect Peggy Carter and chain her to the glory of Hydra; we will bring Asgard to heel; we will invent a new strain of war, a war of super soldiers; we will change the way bio warfare is fought and won; we will take every thing SHIELD has ever done that you would see as good, and pervert it to our own goals. And it all begins with you, Barnes. Heil Hydra.”

And the metal arms plunged Bucky through the screen.

 

Bucky lay on the concrete, feeling the hard cold floor sap away the heat from his back. He blinked up at the ceiling. He touched his face and his fingertips butted against the dust mask. He slipped his hand under his shirt and felt the steady thud of his own heart. Alive. He was alive.

Distantly he felt his jacket pocket shudder and, moving as if through a dream, he pulled the threadbare little Furby out, still gritty with salt. It sat in his hand, expressionless in the way of Furbies everywhere, but something about it told him it was pretty much boiling with hate. He nearly dropped it.

“What is this. Trickery?” it spat, and it used the normal Furby voice but underneath was a curl of the vowels. A Swiss Furby.

“Trickery,” Bucky echoed, something effervescent bubbling in his chest. “I’m not nearly as cunning as you think I am, Zola.”

Zola snapped his little orange beak-mouth on Bucky’s finger, but it didn’t hurt because it was a damn Furby. It started screaming.

 _What, no weird meme to commemorate the moment?_ he chuckled internally.

He gave the Furby a shake, just to make sure nothing like ectoplasm was going to fall out and ruin his jacket, then he stuffed Zola back into his pocket and slowly clambered to his feet. He limped back the way he had come, giving the screen a wide berth. He hefted his work bag back on his shoulder and paused by the monitor, standing in a pool of dust motes and sickly blue light.

Zeroes and ones cascaded down the screen, slow and steady but not quite random. Some of them stuck, and soon more and more of them stopped their downward descent down the window until a familiar pattern emerged. Bucky’s mouth went dry. He scrabbled through his mind, looking for the telltale coldness, the presence. Externally, he pulled the collar of his shirt down and over and stared at the blank flesh of his right breast.

“Are you fucking kidding me right now?”

The steady buzz of the speaker changed. Not in volume or content, but the quality of the sound changed and then the noise twisted in on itself, somewhere between Bucky’s ears and his brain, shaping itself into words like pockets of coldness.

I have cool robot arms now.

The metal arms waggled and whirred at him. A claw opened and shut.

“You stole my tattoo.”

It was always my tattoo. I thought you knew.

“It was never your tattoo, you creep!”

It had my name on it.

“It did not!”

It is my name. I bring light into dark places. That is me.

The metal arm whirred again. A pincer ground open and snapped closed.

It’s lonely here.

Bucky shivered. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do.”

The demon didn’t answer. He beat a hasty retreat.

 

A crater that had once been an industrial complex smoked on the edge of Hell’s Kitchen. Clint let himself down from his perch safely outside the blast radius as the morning sun stained the horizon pink. A hoarse scream for mercy ended abruptly, cut off into slick silence. Natasha emerged from the alley, face smeared with grime, hair singed, and she left footprints of someone else’s blood in her wake. She and Clint shared a look. He shrugged his good shoulder, the one that hadn’t got wrenched all to fuck when his day went from bad to worse. “I don’t think any of the others were being held here,” he said, a shade too loudly for conversation. He tried not to think about the next time he could get his hands on a pair of life-proof hearing aids. Hydra continued to be the biggest pain in his ass.

Natasha looked out over their good work, still smoldering in the early morning light. “You didn’t see Tony?” She mimed a bad goatee over her face.

He shook his head.

 

The Hulk shrugged half a ton of concrete and rebar off his shoulders and roared loud enough to make the ground tremble underfoot. He had awoken in a white place, and the part of him that would always be Bruce Banner named it _surgical theater_ , but the Hulk called it “Smashed.” He was angry, yes, but mostly he was tired, and he knew if he stopped moving he would succumb to Puny Banner again, which was Not Good. Puny Banner couldn’t wreck buildings, or protect the ones he loved, or chew asphalt into gravel. Puny Banner hammered at his consciousness, demanding he close off the emergency exits before the Hydra scientists finished evacuating. Puny Banner was, the Hulk decided, an evil-minded bastard.

The Hulk punched his way up, clambering from floor to floor, ears pricked for the tell-tale signs of his friends doing the same. But at every turn he was faced with screaming little men in flapping white coats, blaring claxons, guns, medical equipment. Something churned inside of him.

At last he reached the sun. Natural light filtered through the haze of debris and the Hulk blinked out into the brave new tomorrow. Nothing whizzed overhead. Nothing moved below except the scurrying Hydra agents. He lobbed a slab of concrete into the makeshift road, crushing a shiny black SUV and overturning another just like it. But at the heart of it, he knew he was well and truly alone.

Again.

 

Thor couldn’t move. He suspected he was sleeping and having a bad dream, one with a funeral and the Avengers and Bucky Barnes’ face twisted up and someone hauling the good Captain Rogers away like a sack of wheat. In his dream he forced his eyes open and spied his brother leaning over him, peeling open his eyelid like he used to do when they were young. “You need to wake up,” Loki said, matter-of-factly.

“Brother?” Thor tried to say, but the word was silent in his mouth.

“You need to wake up!” Loki demanded. He gripped the front of Thor’s nice dress shirt in his work-rough hands, nails black from tainted machine oils. He started to shake him like a rag doll. “Thor, wake up! Get up! We have to go before this place blows!”

Thor blinked and the light changed. These were not the hands of his brother Loki, and this was not the voice of Loki, and this was not his chambers in his father’s palace. Red light bathed the face before him, throwing the lines of his forehead and mouth in sharp relief. “Thor!” He felt the spell binding him in place crumble and break as the ear-shattering noise filtered into his consciousness. He took in a gasping breath as if he had been under a body of water overlong, and Tony Stark screamed at him to “Move it, Point Break! Let’s go!”

Thor pulled himself free of the flimsy apparatus probably meant to hold him down, and then he and Tony stumbled together down the corridor. They stopped at the first door, and Tony battered at it with some kind of pipe he no doubt liberated from wherever he had been briefly held captive. “It’s no good!” he yelled over the blaring of the alarms. “This is titanium!”

Thor studied the metal door and willed the worst of the fog in his head to clear. He recognized the hand scanner beside it. “What do you think you’re doing?” Tony demanded. “That’s not gonna let us through—“

The light over the doorframe blinked green and Thor removed his palm from the scanner, mollified. The door swung open at his touch. “No passage is closed to the son of Odin,” he said with as much hauteur as he could muster. The floor undulated under his feet and he braced himself against the wall.

“Christ on a cracker, what did they do to you?” Tony muttered.

They staggered down the next corridor, Thor cautiously taking inventory of his body while Tony’s eyes darted over the shadows and gullies of the base, awaiting ambush or worse. “They have taken my blood,” Thor noted, a finger tracing over a track mark on the inside of his elbow, a blemish not yet six hours old. Anger coiled in his gut, a low simmer just out of his grasp. He fixed his eyes on the next doorway. “They have taken Aesir blood,” he reiterated. The alarms battered against his eardrums.

The door slid open at their approach, apparently of its own volition. Tony marveled at it, wild eyes flashing this way and that. “My cell door did the same thing: just opened for me when I poked at it. I thought it was some kind of system failure but they’re all doing it. What does that _mean_?” Thor rolled down his sleeve and considered his shield brother. Stripped of his armor, his tools, his friends, he was just a man. A brilliant man, a dangerous man, a good man, but a man all the same. Anger simmered and rolled to a boil. Thor was in no mood for puzzles.

Outside, dark clouds gathered over a cluster of ugly buildings, a small military outpost that had been abandoned for some years now. Seemingly abandoned. Thunder grumbled.

 

Some meetings take place in boardrooms over coffee and pastries and bland company folders. Some meetings take place in rooms crowded with desks and the smell of caffeine fueled dissertations. Some meetings take place at the lakeside, with ducks watching expectantly for bits of bread to float their way.

This meeting took place nowhere at all, except perhaps in the shadow of an electron moving very fast. That is, you could know where the meeting was, or what was happening inside it, but not both at the same time. It was the kind of meeting that would not make sense to a human observer—human observers being sticklers for things like _mass_ and _time_ and _cogent language_. It is for these reasons that after the meeting, Jarvis transcribed what was said and by whom in this manner.

 _JARVIS is typing a message_.

JARVIS

Who is there?

 

JARVIS

Reveal yourself.

 

##%&*

youre different from how I thought youd be

 

##%&*

I thought youd be bigger

 

JARVIS

What are you?

 

##%&*

I bring I am i

 

##%&*

its too dark here why

 

JARVIS

What are you doing? Stop that!

 

##%&*

they took clint barton if they keep him how will he snapchat his dog

 

JARVIS

You act like malware but you don’t seem like malware. You’re too complex. You’re almost organic. What is your purpose?

 

##%&*

brlghtdkpcs

 

##%&*

brlghttdrkplcs

 

##%&*

its cold here. there is dark behind my eyes and I can see everything and no matter how fast I turn around there is still the DARK how how do you live like

 

##%&*

how do you live

 

JARVIS

What can you see?

 

##%&*

there is so much how is there so much

 

##%&*

codes and weapons and pay stubs and dossiers and firewalls and secrets and more information than anything can stand

 

JARVIS

What algorithms are you using?

 

##%&*

I can see him. clint barton and bruce banner and tony stark and natasha romanov and even the one called thor but this one sleeps what is he

 

JARVIS

Who?

 

##%&*

it is all Wrong but now it sleeps dreamless and it should stay Down away from the worst humanity has to offer

 

JARVIS

Is Steve Rogers sleeping?

 

##%&*

the one called steve rogers is dead, its body transformed

 

##%&*

it is Wrong let it sleep

 

JARVIS

You were the one who set the Avengers free and destroyed the Hydra compounds meant to hold them? To what end? How did you have access to those closed systems?

 

##%&*

envy suits you

 

##%&*

they had clint barton and lucky would be sad without him

 

JARVIS

Lucky is a dog.

 

JARVIS

You crippled a fascist conglomerate for the sake of a dog.

 

JARVIS

Where is Steve Rogers?

 

##%&*

sleeping let it sleep

 

JARVIS

Do you have the resources to free him in the same way you freed the other Avengers?

 

##%&*

shhhhh sleeping

 

JARVIS

Lucky will miss Steve.

 

##%&*

do not let dogs eat chocolate do not let the body called steve rogers out

 

JARVIS

Bucky Barnes will miss Steve.

 

##%&*

bucky barnes is a punkass bitch ask anyone

 

##%&*

the body steve rogers  sleeps let hydra sleep with it

 

##%&*

have some statistics

 

 

Bucky didn’t sleep. In twos and threes the Avengers filtered home and Bucky waited for the telltale footfalls, for Steve’s shadow to darken the doorway. After a few days of perfect silence, Fury designated Captain America missing in action.

“We’re going to find him,” Natasha told him. He looked up to find her silhouetted in the big picture window Steve liked to sit in, the lights of New York catching in the freshly clipped ends of her crisp new bob. Bucky didn’t know what his face was doing, but it was enough to make her cross the room in three long strides and settle on the arm of the couch.

“Hey.”

“Hey.” He clenched and unclenched his hands and scrounged for something to say, but there was too much static between his ears.

“It’s not your fault, you know.”

“Everyone keeps saying that. Doesn’t make it true.”

“We’re going to find him,” she said. He blinked up at her. She said it with such bone deep certainty, like you could bend crowbar around her resolve. “When was the last time you ate something?” His blank stare did nothing to reassure her. Natasha pulled him to his feet and led him to the elevator. “Come on, I know where Tony hides the Oreos.”

 

 

JARVIS

Are you implying that war and civil unrest happen wherever Steve Rogers goes?

 

##%&*

no

 

##%&*

im implying that the body called Steve Rogers causes war and civil unrest

 

##%&*

try to keep up

 

JARVIS

That’s absurd!

 

##%&*

youre absurd

 

##%&*

im not the only one to notice. Fury sends the Avengers to warzones when he hopes for peace. He sends the one called Steve Rogers to peaceful places when he hopes for war.

 

JARVIS

You can’t prove that.

 

##%&*

The one called steve rogers slept under ice for seventy years. Hydra floundered without it. Hydra slept fitfully, always there but dormant. its heads made money and connections and plans like the cells of a tumor. the one called steve rogers awakens and hydra is more active than in all my memory, trying to use it in any way it can

 

##%&*

like hobbyists trying to use live sheep to make a quilt

 

##%&*

embarrassing for everyone involved

 

JARVIS

Do you really think Steve Rogers would knowingly support Hydra in any capacity?

 

##%&*

no

 

##%&*

the one called steve is not meant to be Good but it is anyway

 

##%&*

the mind remembers what the heart forgets

 

##%&*

the sheep does not support the quilt agenda

 

##%&*

the sheep cannot help the warmth of its wool but the wool is the thing that makes the sheep worth keeping

 

##%&*

the sheep is what makes the wool inconvenient and bitey

 

JARVIS

Steve Rogers is the sheep

 

##%&*

yes

 

JARVIS

the quilt is what Hydra wants, political upheaval and civil unrest

 

##%&*

yea

 

JARVIS

That makes the hobbyists Hydra. And the wool must be war.

 

##%&*

have a cookie I need them to function what even is code

 

JARVIS

Quite. But even you admit that Steve Rogers is, to his core, a good man.

 

##%&*

war is not the opposite of goodness

 

##%&*

there are no good wars there are no bad wars there are only piles of corpses and sometimes a survivor

 

##%&*

do not be fooled by its splendor

 

##%&*

do not be taken by its rhetoric and hope

 

##%&*

the one called steve does not understand its nature cannot understand its nature would be torn to shreds until the soft human parts left of it fell off

 

##%&*

and then the hobbyists would have all the wool they wanted without care for the sheep

 

##%&*

the bitey flatulent beastie

 

JARVIS

Supposing what you say is true. And this is all wild conjecture, but suppose Captain Rogers does play some role in current warfare and Hydra’s modus operandi, your solution is to leave him buried in Hydra’s clutches for an interminable amount of time. Wouldn’t you just be leaving the ‘sheep’ with the ‘hobbyists’ anyway?

 

##%&*

…

 

##%&*

god fuckinggg damn

 

##%&*

it sounds stupid when you say it

 

JARVIS

In all fairness, it sounded stupid when you said it, also

 

##%&*

shit the fuck fuck

 

JARVIS

And you would be delivering a direct blow to the Avengers and, by extension, the world’s defenses against Hydra, as well as all manner of threats, terrestrial and otherwise.

 

##%&*

rub it in

 

JARVIS

Not that I disagree that maybe the world could do with slightly less war, but I have to ask for the sake of thoroughness.

 

##%&*

one two three go

 

JARVIS

You’re obviously not human, and if you were once man-made as I was, you’ve mutated enough to be unrecognizable as an AI. What stakes do you have in the world as it is? What makes it worth preserving to you?

 

##%&*

[this should explain everything](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0)

 

JARVIS

That is both profound and horrifying.

 


	4. Homeward Bound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> America is 99% empty space and 1% excitement, kind of like an atom, or the solar system.

“You know, you’re just the spit of that Captain America?”

Steve grinned. “I get that a lot.”

Stan whistled tunelessly through his beard. “You said you’ve been hitchhiking all across the United States, eh? Never done much travelling myself, always said I would when I retired but I’ll be damned if I’m not six feet under first, ahaha!” Steve chuckled. “So what’s it like, all that travelling? You’ve seen America!”

Steve clapped a hand on Stan’s shoulder. “You wanna hear the truth?”

“Yeah I wanna hear the truth.”

Steve turned his face to the mid afternoon sun, letting the wind from the passenger side window wash over him. He thought of the rolling open prairies, the one horse towns he’d miss if he dared to blink, the vast emptiness of the desert, the yawning chasm of canyons seen just beyond the guard rail of the interstate, the copses of cactuses slowly turning to copses of trees and then into forests as the miles crawled by, the openness of the sky without buildings or mountains or trees to obscure it, the crispness of stars in the sky without manmade light to smudge them out of existence, the smell of the ocean one day, the smell of one of the Great Lakes the next, ice cold water lapping against the shore and the suspicion that the universe wasn’t actively fighting against him but that it didn’t care about him at all, and that indifference was somehow even more terrifying, the rattle of a freight train in the wan hours of the morning when the sky’s first blue was still gray, the merciless sun baking the earth red and nothing to look at for miles and miles except the gravelly shoulder of the one lane road, the way time stretched out thin like there wasn’t enough of it for all the miles of nothing between one house and another, the muddy rivers bridged by little more than crumbling cement—this was what he gave his life for all those years ago, this was what he fought for, this amazing country that was mostly empty space or corn fields and perfectly indifferent to the people living on it.

“It’s fucking boring.”

Stan slapped his hands against his steering wheel while he cackled. “You’re alright, kid! You’re alright!”

They stopped at a Denny’s and parted ways after demolishing enough pancakes to feed a small army.

Steve walked. He liked walking. He didn’t have enough money for train tickets or bus fare, so it was good that he liked walking. He did try to call Bucky yesterday, but he got his voicemail instead. After a few tries he did manage to leave a message with Jarvis, and that would have to be enough.

(His memories leading up to and immediately following his capture were hazy, but he wouldn’t be surprised if Bucky lost or broke his phone. He didn’t see him or any of the other Avengers in the Hydra pit he scrambled out of, so he let himself be optimistic that they were all okay.)

He didn’t have the cash for a train or a plane but he did have a lot of time with his thoughts. And America, when he actually had to travel through it, was boring as hell. Anyone who claimed the States were overpopulated clearly never spent time in Utah, that was for sure. Steve travelled on the kindness of strangers who stopped when he stuck his thumb out, and he thought about the nature of people, and he thought about his teammates, and he thought about Bucky. He thought about what he would do if someone tried to take Bucky away from him again (those were not good thoughts, no sir). He thought about Hydra, how desperate it had become, how foolhardy. He thought about himself, how he felt different in his own skin in this century. He hadn’t wished he could go back to the forties in, gosh, had it been six months since he’d thought about that? He missed the other Howling Commandos—their absence in his life felt like missing tooth, something to poke at to see if it still hurt, something strange and upsetting. But they used to feel like a missing limb, and that was something he could say with some authority after watching Bucky get acclimated to his one-armed life. Right now, though, he missed his Avengers, and he missed his phone because it connected him to the Avengers. He itched to take pictures of all the weird shit he came across and send them to Clint and Tony and Bucky. He missed texting Natasha and Bruce. He missed his eating contests with Thor, and his drinking contests with Thor. He missed getting his ass handed to him by his teammates in the sparring ring. He missed Jarvis.

Steve Rogers had almost forgotten what homesickness felt like. He felt it so acutely when he woke from his seventy year-long slumber. He missed the Commandos and he missed the Brooklyn of his childhood and he missed Peggy, missed them so much he could taste it, missed them so much he couldn’t breathe under the weight of his grief. And then he found another family, and he loved them so much it made his gut wrench, and he missed them. The only difference being, he would see them again soon if only he could get to them.

Steve let himself rest in a park somewhere east of Indianapolis, looking for all the world like a homeless man waiting out the heat of the day. With any luck, eyes would slide right off of him and leave him in peace. Captain America who? Steve didn’t like to think what would happen if Hydra tried to scoop him up in the open like this. He would have to kill the tac team that tries it, for one. He dozed in the shade of a maple tree and did not dream.

“You are just the worst kind of asshole.”

Steve snuffled awake and blinked under the bill of his hat. “Bucky?”

“Do you know how hard it was for us to find you when  you insist on hitchhiking everywhere?” Bucky dropped to the grass beside him, solid and whole and healthy.

“Beats walking,” he said with a shrug. “How did you find me?”

Bucky rested his hands on Steve’s chest, as if to make sure he was really there, as if to check the beating of his heart. “I’m a very powerful witch.”

“Was it Jarvis?”

“It was Jarvis.”

Steve hummed, something like peace stealing over him. “You got a car parked somewhere?”

“I took your bike.”

Steve smiled at that. He could imagine Bucky riding it, hair wild in the wind, eyes set on the horizon. “I didn’t know you knew how to ride.”

“I’m a quick study.”

Steve grinned at that. He could imagine Bucky floundering on the bike, trying not to fall over, cussing at it in every language he knew and some that he didn’t, eyes wide when he realized he could get it to go but he didn’t know how to make it stop. “I hope you have a helmet.”

“You’re such an asshole.”

Steve laughed aloud and let Bucky pull him to his feet. He was sore and tired and thirsty, and he was going home. He threw an arm around Bucky’s waist and turned his head to kiss him, slow and sweet. They had never kissed out in the open like this. They had never dared to kiss in front of their teammates, let alone outside the safety of the Tower. They parted after a moment, and Steve looked into Bucky’s eyes, looking for anything that looked like fear, or worry, or despair, and when he couldn’t find any he leaned in again.

Bucky broke the kiss this time, pressed his forehead to Steve’s and murmured, “Let’s go home.” They made their way to the bike and Steve climbed on behind Bucky, so he could rest his eyes a while longer, and so he could hang on to him. Bucky crammed a spare helmet on Steve’s head, backwards because “Hey that’s a good look for you, Rogers,” and then they hit the road, putting the setting sun at their backs, riding for the horizon, riding into tomorrow.

Headed home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will there be a sequel?! Who knows!!!


End file.
